


Reflection and Shine

by GretchenSinister



Series: My Top 20 Short Gen Fics [18]
Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-29 21:33:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,909
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20089099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "What it says. Mainly inspired by the fact that his race is listed as “ice elf” and some other things.Jack falls in the lake, but pops out the other side into the land of fairies. Spends enough time their to gradually absorb some magic without his noticing at first- when he decides to go back, 300 years have passed."I wrote this as Jack having all his powers, but inexplicably ending up in Faerie. He still has no memory of his past, and the Guardians have to bring him back to the real world.This doesn’t go smoothly because Jack doesn’t know what’s going on.





	Reflection and Shine

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 8/24/2016.

He doesn’t know who he is, and no one else seems to, either. But no one else seems too surprised that he’s here; no one’s told him he belongs somewhere else.  
  
Sometimes they do look at him curiously, but Jack can only accept that as fair. He’s given more than his share of curious looks to the beings around him that fill the halls and ballrooms with their myriad forms.   
  
He doesn’t like to wonder why they should be surprising to him, when he doesn’t remember anything else.  
  
He thinks he’s been there a few days when someone recognizes him. A tall man with a long grey beard and a long red coat locks eyes with him in a crowded ballroom. “Jack!” he calls, and this is enough to unsettle Jack—no one’s asked for his name here yet, and he hasn’t offered it. The man stands out from the crowd in other ways, too. He seems taller than the rest of them, though Jack knows he can’t be, he’s only a couple of feet taller than Jack, and some of the guests here are three times Jack’s height. His coat is a brighter red than the blood Jack’s seen spilled here; the fur at the cuffs blacker than the night. He makes everything around him seem like the reflection in a soap bubble, and Jack is afraid.  
  
He runs, and the man cries out in frustration, and Jack doesn’t see him again.  
  


* * *

  
  
The next day, as Jack can count it, the Queen holds an audience. Jack doesn’t dare to ask for any favors, and he doesn’t even know what he would ask for, but he comes to watch all the same. It’s good to know what’s going on, to know what’s happened.   
  
Favors are denied, and favors are granted, and in a very few cases, they are granted in the way the petitioner hoped they would be. Jack thinks the audience is ending when one more person walks through the doors at the end of the hall. She almost looks as if she should be here, a small woman covered from head to foot in iridescent feathers, only her hands and face bare. A buzzing, glittering blur of insect wings supports her as she moves through the audience toward the throne.   
  
She looks into the crowd as she moves, and she meets Jack’s eyes. And this is when Jack realizes that she shimmers brighter than any jewels of this place; that she stands out in exactly the same way as the man who knew his name.   
  
And Jack is afraid for the sake of the capricious Queen who is the only one he knows, and he is afraid for himself. He ducks out and resolves to never ask what the feathered woman petitioned for.  
  


* * *

  
  
A few days after this, Jack is invited on a hunt, as a hunter. He is proud of this, and makes sure his clothes are as fine as he can make them, that they show no hint of the mended, undyed shirt and the too-short trousers they always show themselves as when he sleeps.  
  
He is resplendent in blue and silver, tall on his white charger, as he loses himself in the forest. He separates himself from the rest of the party, hoping to find their quarry on his own.   
  
And yet, when he does: “Oh, why did they do this to you?” Jack asks the man-sized rabbit frozen at the edge of the clearing. He does not reach for his weapon.  
  
The rabbit turns around. There’s no fear in his face; he was waiting for Jack. “No one did anything to me,” he says. “I was just trying to get you alone. There’s nothing anyone in here could do to anyone like me.” And Jack sees his eyes, greener than any of the leaves on the trees here.  
  
He’s not sure how he escapes. The rabbit chases him for a long time, and he’s fast, so fast.   
  
When Jack joins with the other hunters, he says nothing of what he’s seen.  
  


* * *

  
  
He doesn’t know who to ask about these people who seem realer than real. No one else is talking about them, not even ones he knows saw the feathered woman. The queen must know something, because she saw her directly and must have addressed her, but Jack doesn’t want to bother her with something as trivial as a question he doesn’t know how to frame.  
  
Besides, he doesn’t know when the next day of petition will be.  
  
He wanders through the corridors of the palace, avoiding all conversation. He doesn’t feel this is truly his life, truly his world, but he can’t remember anything else. And he doesn’t really want for anything, here. What could be outside this place? Is it anywhere he wants to go?  
  
Eventually his path takes him to a wide, sunny gallery. He’s not alone, there. In one of the long chairs that looks like it’s made of roots growing up from the floor, a small person reads from a massive book that almost conceals them entirely. All Jack can see of them are their little hands and a pair of gold shoes.  
  
“Hello,” says a very soft voice.  
  
“Hello,” says Jack, without thinking. Earlier, he had wanted to be left alone, but by now he had started to feel unpleasantly invisible. “Were you talking to me?”  
  
“Yes, you, bluejacket,” the soft voice says.  
  
What a relief—at least this mysterious stranger isn’t one of the ones who seems to know him or his name. “Well, then, hello again, gold shoes.”  
  
Gold Shoes turns a page. “Have you seen many mirrors around this palace?”  
  
Jack opens his mouth to say of course there are mirrors around, this is a _palace,_ isn’t it? But as he thinks back through everything he can remember, he realizes that, no, he actually hasn’t seen any mirrors here at all. But then how does he know what one is? The Queen must have one, surely, and perhaps he heard others talking about it? And, then again, what does it matter? “No, not as such,” he says. “But there’s so much that shines. It’s not as if anyone needs to go out of their way to find out what they look like.”  
  
“Yes, there’s a lot that shines,” says Gold Shoes. “But does anything reflect?”  
  
“What’s the difference?” Jack laughs. “Do you need a mirror? Put down that book and I’ll tell you what you look like, if you’re so uncertain.”  
  
“That won’t be necessary,” Gold Shoes says, sounding amused. “I’ve looked in a mirror recently. I have one with me, you see.” They gesture to a table beside them, and Jack sees, to his surprise, a hand mirror edged in gold lying there. There’s nothing that should make it seem so out of place, save for the fact that Jack hasn’t seen anything of the sort in all the time he can remember clearly. “Would you like to look in it?” Gold Shoes asks.  
  
Jack would. Very much. It’s an odd impulse, though, and he’s wary of it. “Why should I?”  
  
“Because I swear no magic shall be done to you upon touching it or looking in it. I swear it, and I swear it, and I swear it.” Gold Shoes sounds bored by the oath, but at least they knew what had given Jack pause.   
  
And it’s a good oath. “Then yes, I would,” Jack says. He steps forward and picks up the mirror, looks into it and sees…  
  
A young man. Paler and brighter than the moonlight here, eyes bluer than the sky here, hair whiter than the snow here. Everything around him seems to fade away, becoming no more substantial than a soap bubble. His grip slackens, and a small gold hand joins his on the mirror’s handle. Heart pounding, he follows the hand back to the being that owns it, to see that Gold Shoes is just like the three others, their clothes and skin, hair and eyes, shining brighter than all the gold here.  
  
Jack can’t make himself run away. It’s no use. He’d never get away from himself, anyway. And now, now the palace and everything around it, it seems like such a nothing, a nowhere. “I’m,” he whispers, “I’m like you. But you’re not from here. Does that mean I’m not from here?”  
  
“Excellent logic, Jack Frost” the gold being says.  
  
They say his full name and nothing happens. Something should happen. Something would have happened, if he really belonged in this palace. “I don’t understand,” he says.  
  
“Do you want to understand?” The gold being says. “Do you want to understand with all your heart? Do you want to go to a place that doesn’t fade around you?”  
  
“I—yes!” Jack says. It’s perfectly true in that moment. The gold being nods, and brings up the mirror over his head, and it seems to grow, grow until it’s as large as the surface of a pond, and the gold being brings it down to shatter over his head and  
  
and he’s gasping, struggling in freezing water, shards of ice breaking away under his hands as he tries to find purchase, tries to find somewhere he can breathe and look around, tries to find shore. There’s warmth, suddenly, at his back and around his waist, and he sees the gold being, also drenched in the icy water, holding him and pulling him toward—yes!—shore! The other three people he saw who frightened him so are there, too, but now they’re only as real as everything else around them.  
  
“Ahh! Finally! Sandy, you did it!” The feathered woman shouts. She zooms toward them, and Jack wheezes out something incoherent as Sandy passes him up to her. He can hear the rabbit and the tall man urging Tooth—who must be the woman—and Sandy to get him out of the water, get him out of the water, before they notice he’s gone!  
  
They bundle him into a sleigh, draping him in the tall man’s coat. Sandy seems no worse for wear, and all of them, in fact, seem immensely glad to see him, particularly him. He hadn’t had that in the palace. Now, he finds he’s glad of the attention, but he wishes he knew why they felt this way.  
  
“Three hundred years, North!” Tooth says, as the sleigh lurches and begins to move slowly away. “Three hundred years in maybe only ten days! It’s incredibly unusual!”  
  
“Yes, and we cannot ignore, now that we have Jack,” North says. “We must know why, and how, before we find more changelings. We must know if they want to keep Jack as badly as they seemed to.”  
  
Jack doesn’t understand, but the things he hears don’t slip away from his ears or mind, as they often seemed to in the palace. Even with the icy wind whipping past him, he can think that he made the right choice. He will understand things, here. He will know how many days pass at a time, here.  
  
And he’ll be able to trust, here, too, he thinks, as Sandy tries to chafe warmth into his fingers, and the rabbit smiles at him, and there’s no talk of Queens, or ranks, or names, and no one’s blinked twice at how ragged he’s become once again.   
  
So, Jack thinks, as he starts to fall asleep, this is the difference between reflection and shine. 

**Author's Note:**

> Tags and Comments from Tumblr:
> 
> #I just made up that thing with the mirror resemblance to anything else is complete coincidence
> 
> imafangirl280 said: Yesyesyesyes sososogood I can’t comprehend thanks for making this
> 
> kazechama said: This is so good. I love it ❤💜💙💚💛💖💖💖💖
> 
> sylphidine said: Gorgeous and stark.


End file.
